A new Battlefield 2 Community Update has a status report on plans for a
hotfix for memory leak issues with Battlefield 2 version 1.01. Although the site
states "EA and DICE are committed to getting a fix for
v1.01 as soon as we possibly can," in the meantime they are suggesting
that users downgrade by reinstalling the original unpatched version of the game:

HOTFIX for Battlefield 2 v1.01 Coming Soon
First off, a HUGE thanks to all of you who emailed me in regards to the
memory leak found in the update we released earlier this week (v1.01). Your
emails found their way to our production team and they’re in the process of
evaluating what needs to be done in order to get this fixed. In the meantime,
and since the 1.01 update is causing memory leakage on some systems, we
recommend that you reinstall the game and NOT the v1.01 update we
released earlier this week.

Reinstalling Battlefield 2 will not affect your in-game medals or ranked server
statistics. EA and DICE are committed to getting a fix for v1.01 as soon as we
possibly can and will continue to keep you informed through this web space in
the coming days.

NOTE: If you installed and are running the newer server files (Win and Linux
versions) we made available earlier this week, please revert those as well. We
found that those files had the same issues with memory leaks as did the v1.01
update. You can download the older versions
here.